Jun 13, 2007

What is a Transactional Email and How Can You Use Them?

Transactional emails come in many shapes and forms and could be a very nice form of business for you, in many cases some of your best performing email.

Here are examples of transactional email:

Thank you emails after someone purchases from you.

Shipping notification of a product you sold.

Your confirmation email when a visitor signs up for your site.

Information about your customers rewards or points programs.

Your Privacy Policy changes.

Product feature changes or releases.

Warranty information, product recall information or safety or security information from a product or service you sell.

Any account balance information or statements to a subscription, membership, account, loan.

Product updates or upgrades, that your recipient needs to know about.

An email can remain "transactional" under CAN-SPAM but still include
promotional content as long as the primary purpose is not promotional.
What does that mean? The subject line needs to relate to the
transactional message and the content must be mainly transaction-based.
The entire transactional message must appear at the beginning of the
email.

So what can you do?

Make sure you're putting the content into your transactional email, not your IT person (sorry!)

Add some color! Most transactional emails are boring text-based
emails. Use images, use color and HTML to make it interesting PLUS it's
the only way you'll get reporting on them.

Track them! Make sure you get reporting on who clicked and who
opened the email. See the VerticalResponse API site to help if you need
us to do this function for you instead of your IT staff.

Include a few links and content to a cross-sell of a product or service you think your recipients would like.

Include other areas of your site for them to browse for more information on the product they purchased.